Extreme Systems Administration

I’m often asked about my super-hero origin story. Everyone has one they’re not all as interesting as Superman’s baby crash landing on a farm prologue. My journey to DevOps started way back in my CompuServe days with my boss’ insistence that everything be scripted and automated. But another start point is the PDF I’ve included below.

I’ve written before about how AOL embraced Agile and had Thoughtworks help our development teams. I’ve also mentioned that the Ops team (my team) and the test team were left to fend for ourselves and figure out what Agile meant to us. One of the way I did that is with the excellent post below. I have failed to find a link to it on the internet hence presenting it in this format here. If anyone knows Ken Macleod from below please thank him from me. My thanks have already been given to the guy in my team who found this document. 14 years on it still makes excellent reading. Enjoy:

If you’d like the PDF complete with my scribbles from 2003 you can download it here: Extreme_Sys_admin